Is there a word that can be used to mean two previous places? I want to reference something two paragraphs ago; former would work if it was only one before, and I cannot use penultimate because it may be confused with the second to last of the entire work.

I think that you can trust your readers to have enough of an attention span to figure out which paragraph is being referred to in that case. If not there are either some serious problems with your writing style or you're writing something that's altogether far too meta (but I repeat myself).

But the blogger inserted two paragraphs of text before the image, whereas OP is looking for a word for text two paragraphs before... . If even you can be confused, maybe this isn't unambiguous.
–
TimLymingtonAug 8 '11 at 17:59